DECam LMC new variable sources

The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) is a sensitive, wide field instrument mounted at the prime focus of the 4m V. Blanco Telescope in Chile. Beside its main objectives, i.e. understanding the growth and evolution of structures in the Universe, the camera offers the opportunity to observe a ~3deg^2^ field of view in one single pointing and, with an adequate cadence, to identify the variable sources contained. In this paper, we present the result of a DECam observational campaign toward the LMC and give a catalogue of the observed variable sources. We considered all the available DECam observations of the LMC, acquired during 32 nights over a period of two years (from February 2018 to January 2020), and set up a specific pipeline for detecting and characterizing variable sources in the observed fields. Here, we report on the first 15 deg2 in and around the LMC as observed by DECam, testing the capabilities of our pipeline. Since many of the observed fields cover a rather crowded region of the sky, we adopted the ISIS subtraction package which, even in these conditions, can detect variables at a very low signal to noise ratio. All the potentially identified variable sources were then analyzed and each light curve tested for periodicity by using the Lomb-Scargle and Schwarzenberg-Czerny algorithms. Furthermore, we classified the identified sources by using the UPSILoN neural network. This analysis allowed us to find 70981 variable stars, 1266 of which were previously unknown. We estimated the period of the variables and compared it with the available values in the catalogues. Moreover, for the 1266 newly detected objects, an attempted classification based on light curve analysis is presented.

Cone search capability for table J/other/NewA/103.J2043/table (DECam LMC catalog of variables images)

Identifier
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/other/NewA/103.J2043
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/other/NewA/103.J2043
Related Identifier http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/other/NewA/103.J2043
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/other/NewA/103.J2043
Provenance
Creator Franco A.; Nucita A.A.; De Paolis F.; Strafella F.; Sacquegna S.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2024
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Galactic and extragalactic Astronomy; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics; Stellar Astronomy